


We'll Meet Again

by provocation



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: F/F, Femslash February, Femslash February 2020, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22791259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocation/pseuds/provocation
Summary: The thought of exploring the Forge alone would be unthinkable.(Emily/Elsie for fem Feb wherein they survived in the Forge together.)
Relationships: Elsie Hughes (Westworld)/Emily (Westworld)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	We'll Meet Again

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gift for [Ant](https://twitter.com/tedeIove), who opened my eyes to yet another wonderful ship involving Elsie. I also owe thanks to [Ren](https://archiveofourown.org/users/myfeatherbed) for proofreading this!
> 
> I am still accepting FemFeb prompts all throughout the month, [and you can submit your request here](https://montparnasse.tumblr.com/tagged/femfeb/chrono)! Writing these drabbles/ficlets have been so much fun; I'm in a pretty rough place right now personally and the distractions have been wonderful. Thank you to everyone requesting fic and to all of you who have been reading these. Your comments, kudos, bookmarks, messages, etc etc etc mean the world to me. I hope you enjoy this!

All is peaceful here, in the aftermath. A lark, still running well past its expiry date, hails the morning from some distant tree. Neither woman pays any attention to its song, both as tightly coiled as possible without fracturing under the tension and pressure. On each of their placemats at the table sits a glass of cold water, a fresh meal awaiting them, clean and polished cutlery, napkins folded perfectly, and a handgun. The old kind, from Sweetwater.

Neither woman pays any attention to the other woman’s gun, although they are ready to spring at any moment. Elsie yawns, dreary in the pale yellow morning. “Okay. When was your first cigarette?”

“Thirteen,” Emily says, rolling her eyes. Her voice is still hoarse and low from sleep, and it sends delightful shudders up Elsie’s spine. “I hate that you start with that one.”

“Sorry,” Elsie grins. “It’s the first fact you volunteered about yourself when I asked for suggestions.”

Emily groans, but she’s smiling too. They have this fight at least once a week. “It’s so morbid.”

“It’s your life!”

“My life is so morbid!” Emily rolls her neck around, stretching and cracking it with little regard for etiquette or her appearance. 

Her appearance is perfect, of course, as it is every morning. She never needs to curl her hair or put on a drop of makeup; she really wakes up like that. Elsie can’t attest to whether that’s part of the magic of this place, or if Emily looked like that every day in real life too. She wants to reach out and brush back Emily’s perfect hair, but they haven’t finished their routine yet. “Sleep well last night?”

“Hardly,” Emily snarks at her without malice. They share the secret smile of lovers, of spouses. “Okay, my turn. When was your first kiss?”

“I hate _that_ question,” Elsie mumbles, shrinking into her seat. “Not until my sophomore year of college.”

Emily wiggles her eyebrows. “And how was it?”

“None of your business,” Elsie does reach out and touch her now, swatting her knee gently. “Em, come on, is this really necessary? We both know everything interesting about each other by now.”

“I’m not losing myself here,” Emily says. She doesn’t return the touch at first, back still ramrod-straight. Her curls are still perfect and picturesque, her skin unblemished. Eventually her hand moves to close over Elsie’s, and they exhale together. “And neither are you. Your turn.”

“Fine.” A breeze blows by their table, carrying the sound of nearby conversation with it. Elsie turns her hand in Emily’s, dragging her knuckles over the woman’s knee and fitting their palms together. “What’s your mother’s name?”

“Juliet. Juliet Delos,” Emily says without a scrap of grief. They’ve dealt with that together in their time here, and now the memories that once made her inconsolable every time she recalled them have little power. The vein in her forehead twinges, but that’s it. “What about you?”

“Helen Hughes,” Elsie says, a little too fast. Emily squeezes their hands together and Elsie closes her eyes, glad for the comfort. When she opens them, Emily’s face is alarmingly close. “Wait, wait, we aren’t done!”

“I know you,” Emily says, punctuating the sentence with a kiss to Elsie’s cheek. The corners of their lips brush together, almost light enough to tickle. Elsie grins. “And you know me. And you know yourself, and I know myself. Isn’t that enough? Can’t we skip the rest of this procedure and just enjoy breakfast together?”

Elsie thinks she would agree to any request that Emily asked of her as long as it was followed by a kiss. She returns the gesture, properly, and then nods. Their noses bump. “Fine,” she laughs. “Fine. I trust you.”

“I don’t know if you would have trusted me if we met out there, in the real version of this place.” Emily’s breath puffs against her lips and mouth and teeth, and Elsie struggles not to chase it and interrupt her. “I certainly wouldn’t have trusted you. I never liked the park interfering in my guest affairs; another gift from my father, I suppose.”

“Well, I’m not the park,” Elsie reminds her. “And anyway, I think you rather like playing the pampered rich guest to my lowly service employee, coming to check on one of our best assets.” She tries to play up the sexy factor but she’s really bad at it compared to Emily, who laughs and looks endeared and charmed anyway. “I would have never approached you, though. I didn’t like hanging out with the investors or their kids.”

“Can’t fault you for that.” Emily pulls back. At another table someone sits down for breakfast; Elsie glances over but she doesn’t recognize them. They keep the guns within reach even though this place is safer than any of the parks, and safer than the real world itself. The guns are more of a comfort than anything else since they don’t know what happens to people when they die here.

She feels Emily watching her and turns to catch the glance. The woman makes no attempt to hide her interest, staring at Elsie with those wide, dark eyes. Elsie coughs. “I didn’t mean to bring up… the investors.” _Your father._

Emily waves her off and reaches for her drink; something peach-coloured in a long glass flute. Everything here should taste false, since it is a recreation of a recreation. But Elsie has never been able to notice a difference, and if anyone else real like Emily has noticed, they haven’t mentioned it. In some ways the Forge is more real than their old worlds.

The rest of their daily routine deals with questions about the Forge itself— questions like _who uploaded you into this place?_ To which Elsie always answers that she doesn’t know, but she suspects Bernard. He’s here too, although she hasn’t been able to muster up the strength to sit down with him yet in all their time spent here. She doesn’t think he would know either.

Emily’s answer is simpler, yet more complex. Guest interactions are recorded for the explicit purpose of rebuilding and then uploading them to this false synthetic heaven, but Emily’s answer always seems to hint that she thinks that her father did it. At first Elsie balked at the idea— what father would condemn his child to live on in virtual purgatory— but as she learns more about William and spends more time here, she begins to understand the beauty of it.

The reasons why they were built and uploaded into the Forge matter less and less every morning, but still they insist on their routine to ground themselves. Elsie does it most mornings to appease Emily; she’s selfishly glad to be locked in heaven with this person she would never have had a chance with in the real world. But on other days, when she wakes up twitching from memories that don’t belong to her anymore, it’s a comfort to recall exactly who she is— or whose grave she was born in, anyway.

Emily’s fingers curl around the base of the glass as she sets it down. “I’ve got a new question for you.” Her gaze is shrewd and searching and beautiful as ever. Elsie is enveloped in it. “When did you fall for me?”

“Oh shit,” Elsie laughs to try and hide her mortification. She fails miserably. “I, actually— okay, this is embarrassing, because it was. A long time ago. Before the Forge, back when— there was a party, and you got invited as a plus-one and one of the most important guests.”

Emily leans forward. “ _Before_ the Forge?”

“Yeah,” Elsie groans. “It was this open house in Pariah; you were wearing this dress that looked kind of like a mosaic and you didn’t want to talk to anyone. You were just moping around.”

“Geez. I sound like fun.”

“You were sober, I think,” Elsie pretends to struggle to remember, like she hasn’t replayed it a hundred times over. “And you looked so bored that I… Okay, promise you won’t tell Bernard if you ever run into him down here?”

Emily deadpans, “Are you still worried about impressing your old boss?”

“No! Just don’t mention it,” Elsie mutters, ducking her head. “I was only supposed to be there as a guest— I mean, _I_ sure wasn’t sober. But I reprogrammed one of the hosts to come over and talk to you, because I thought you could do with a little cheering up.”

Recognition sparks, and Emily finally cracks a smile. “Clementine.”

Elsie nods, trying to breathe evenly. “One of my favourites,” she says as casually as she can. Emily raises an eyebrow but Elsie doesn’t elaborate— _that’s_ a story for another time. “And she went over to you to try to… well, I don’t know, cheer you up. She’s got an almost perfect approval rate, so you can imagine how surprised I was when you sent her away almost instantly.”

“I’ve never needed the company of hosts,” Emily snaps. There’s that deep-rooted trauma rearing its ugly head again. Elsie stares at her until the realization sinks in of where and _who_ they are, and now Emily is the one looking slightly embarrassed. “Sorry. Go on.”

“It’s okay, I— I know. I talked to Clementine; I mean, I pulled her aside to find out what she’d done wrong. And she just told me you had said, ‘I don’t want it unless I know you do, and you can’t,’ and then you’d kissed her hand and sent her off. And it was just so unexpected.” Elsie flushes. “So that was— I mean, that was a lifetime ago, but that was. That was when I first felt myself falling.”

Emily is quiet for a very long moment, leaving her dangling. When she finally speaks she only says, “You need to set the bar higher,” but she is laughing without cruelty and she looks genuinely charmed.

“I’m fine with where the bar is.” Their mouths meet again; Emily tastes like peaches and limoncello now. She tries to chase after the kiss but Elsie pulls away, laughing too. “Okay, tell me yours now!”

“Fine.” Emily reaches down to refold her skirts in her lap delicately, lowering her gaze. “It wasn’t long after I got here when you found me, and I was still hurting. Bleeding all over, all scraped up. I didn’t understand where I was because I still thought… well, you know.”

Elsie slides forward and down from her chair so that she can kneel on the grass in front of Emily, entering her field of vision and resting her chin on her knee. Some of the distance and shrapnel fade from Emily’s face, beset and banished by fondness and warmth. She continues, moving one hand to run through Elsie’s short hair. “And you patched me up, and you seemed so concerned about my lack of ‘emotional responses’. That just… tickled me so much, that you thought I was a host, that I just started laughing. Then you got _really_ worried, so I had to explain that I was human, and… well, you know the rest.”

Elsie reaches for Emily’s free hand, teasing it away from its fistful of fabric and weaving their fingers together instead. She squeezes their palms together gently, thinking of that first meeting and that first misunderstanding and all the blunders and realizations since, until finally the awful and glorious truth of their new existence had been revealed to them, at which point they had grown so close that the thought of exploring the Forge alone would be unthinkable.

“I know the rest,” she says. Emily pulls her up off of her knees to kiss her again, and they have a thoroughly unproductive morning.


End file.
